windows, curious bystanders and smart soldiers thronged
the square, and I and the other boys climbed on to the big horse of the
Elector's statue and looked down on the gay crowd."[1]

[Footnote 1: Heine, _Collected Works_, i. 228 (Book _Le Grand_).]

Napoleon and his French soldiers, "marching through the world with songs
and shining sabres," brought the Germans more than this happy thrill of
excitement and a supply of new and more elegant princes. They brought them
that which gave strength to their own right arm--the spirit of Nationality.
"The soul of the German people," says a recent German writer, "has always
lain very deep down, and has seldom come to the surface to become the
spirit of the time and to inspire the movements of the world. Hardly ever
except in times of the deepest adversity has it come to the surface: but
then it has claimed its rights, or rather, discovered its duties."[1]
Napoleon, by humiliating her, laid bare the soul of Germany, as Germany
herself has laid bare the soul of Belgium to-day. His arrogant pretensions
roused the Germans as they had never been roused since the days of the
Reformation; while at the same time his attempts to secure the support of
the bigger German principalities by enlarging them at the expense of the
smaller, simplified the map and laid the foundations of a United Germany.
The thinkers and dreamers of Germany, stung at last into a sense of
political reality, awoke from their dreams of cosmopolitanism and devoted
their powers to the needs of the German nation.

[Footnote 1: Daab's Preface to Paul de Lagarde, _German Faith, German
Fatherland, German Culture_, p. vi. (Jena, 1913).]

The years between 1806 and 1813, between the disastrous battle of Jena
and the overwhelming victory of Leipzig, are the greatest years in German
history. Shaking off the torpor and the prejudices of centuries the German
nation arose and vanquished its oppressors.

But with the twilight of that glorious day the bats returned. The defeat of
Napoleon was not only the defeat of French domination but the defeat of the
French Revolution, and of the principles of Democracy and Nationality which
inspired it. The unity of spirit which the Germans had achieved on the
battlefield they were unable to transform after the victory into a unity of
government or institutions. The Congress of Vienna, which redrew the map
of Europe after the Revolutionary wars, did so, not in accordance with
the principle of